buffering

If you've been following our coverage of themanyseparatePlayStoreexperiments, you'll know that Google has a tendency to test several interface changes at once. This time, at least three new video loading animations have been spotted in the YouTube app.

YouTube is the darling app of interface tinkerers at Google. The team behind it is always trying something new, testing the waters with A/B server-side changes that some users see, others don't, and we like writing about (exhibit A, B, C, and so on). Now we're getting tips about a new change that's surfacing for a lot of users, which makes us think this might be a relatively wide rollout that you could encounter as well.

When you pause a video in the YouTube app, a new buffering progress overlay shows up below the play button. It clearly states the total size of the video and how much of it has been buffered.

Another major enhancement we've just learned about with the announcement of Jelly Bean is called Project Butter. Butter (so named likely due to the colloquialism "smooth as butter") represents a new, more efficient processing framework for Android's latest and greatest iteration, making the OS much faster (allowing animation up to 60fps). Android 4.1 also makes apps more responsive, reducing touch latency and "anticipating where your finger will be at the time of screen refresh."

"How is such an enhancement possible?" I can almost hear you wondering. Take it from the Android developer site:

To ensure a consistent framerate, Android 4.1 extends vsync timing across all drawing and animation done by the Android framework.